The National Labor Relations Board ruled last week that two unrelated companies may be held to be joint employers of an employee who works for just one of the companies. Browning-Ferris Industries of California, 362 NLRB No. 186 (August 27, 2015), ruled that unrelated companies may be joint employers even if one employer has no power to hire, fire, supervise or determine the pay of an employee of the other employer.

The NLRB says that it “will no longer require that a joint employer not only possess the authority to control employees’ terms and conditions of employment, but also exercise that authority”.

In other words, if you as a business owner contractually could say anything to your subcontractor about the work you want performed by the subcontractor’s employees, then you can be jointly liable to those employees if any of the subcontractor’s employment practices go awry, even if you never actually exercise any control over your subcontractor’s employees. Continue reading Employers Face “Joint Employer” Liability with Unrelated Companies→

There are companies that want to sell you expensive workplace posters that you don’t need to purchase because they are available for free online. Many employers are afraid that they don’t know which employment notices must be visible in the workplace, so they fall for the marketing pitch to pay for these expensive commercial posters.

As a Texas employer, have you received advertising in the mail similar to the notice pictured here? Such notices appear official, and can feel almost threatening, with warnings of penalties and fines associated with an employer failing to post current state and federal employment posters in the workplace.

It is not necessary for a Texas employer to pay $84 for the poster offered here. While it is true that posting certain notices and information is legally required, employers need not pay any company for this information. Free copies of the required posters can be found from the websites of each of the federal or Texas agencies that require them. The Texas Workforce Commission has graciously gathered a list of these posters into one place for you here.

Not only are you out the money if you buy one of these expensive posters, but these for-profit posters could actually hurt you if they promise rights to your employees that the law does not give them (such as promising Family and Medical Leave rights if the company has less than 50 employees and isn’t required to provide Family and Medical Leave). You don’t want to obligate yourself to things the law doesn’t require you to provide. The poster “invoice” pictured here didn’t ask the size of the employer’s workforce and apparently was not tailored to the laws to which a particular employer was subject.

In a recently posted database, the federal Department of Labor (“DOL”) has allowed the public to see the companies who have been investigated for various violations of the laws the DOL enforces, including overtime violations, minimum wage violations and independent contractor violations.

I quickly scanned the records just for 2014-2015. During that time, more than 35 Amarillo businesses were investigated. Some employed just three or four people. Others employed more than 100. But there are some visible trends in the local DOL investigators’ handiwork.

Local preschools were put under the microscope because they often pay their teachers on salary rather than hourly, resulting in frequent Fair Labor Standards Act violations. Amarillo and Canyon hotels are a favorite target, often because they pay housekeeping personnel by the room, rather than by the hour. Amarillo restaurants were repeated targets because of common violations of the tip wage credit, which allows restaurants to include tips in the calculation of whether their employees are making minimum wage or because the restaurant paid employees on salary. Local construction companies, heating and air companies and plumbers showed up on the investigation list probably because their blue-collar workers were not paid overtime correctly, weren’t paid for their travel time, or were put on salary as supervisors when they regularly performed labor that should have been paid hourly.

Other industries that were affected by the DOL’s local efforts in the last year included home healthcare, landscaping, retail, trucking, medical, automobile service and online companies.